Systemic approach to minimize stuck pipe incidents in oil wells

Abstract EN

Stuck pipe is one of the major drilling problems in petroleum industry, leading to losses of hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

Expensive corrective action may include fishing operations, side track the hole, or plug and abandon the well.

Significant production loss and delayed drilling operations may result.

Therefore, major efforts have been made worldwide to determine the causes and to minimize the occurrence of stuck pipe.

The severe impact of this drilling problem was one of the prime incentives to prepare this paper.

The impact of stuck pipe on both cost and safety can be avoided by better planning, understanding, communication, and perfect execution.

More than 50 stuck pipe incidents are analyzed and investigated in detail including twenty two stuck pipe cases in two Arabian Gulf countries.

Thorough investigation, lessons learned and statistical analysis were used during 18-month period to check for improvement in incident rate and corrective action success rate.

The majority of stuck pipe incidents in the Arabian Gulf study area was found to be caused by Differential sticking, then Mechanical Sticking plus Wellbore Geometry, then Hole Pack-off due to formation instability.

Stuck pipe prevention awareness and training is mandatory for the drilling team in order to raise the level of awareness and to improve the competency of all relevant personnel.

A poster is also proposed to highlight the risk of stuck pipe and to raise awareness among drilling personnel.

The paper presents the statistics analysis for all the captured cases and concludes the best practices and recommendations to reduce the stuck pipe occurrences.